How to shoot for Sharp
Every tool starts from several shots of the same scene. A few minutes of care when shooting make the merge cleaner than anything afterwards can. For all of them: keep the exposure, white balance and focus the same from frame to frame unless the tool says otherwise (manual mode, or lock them), and shoot RAW or the best JPEG your camera makes.
Focus — a focus bracket
- Use a tripod for macro; handheld works for products and landscapes, and Sharp lines the frames up.
- Start with the nearest part of the subject in focus and move the focus a little further each frame until the farthest part is sharp. Each frame’s sharp zone should overlap the next one’s.
- Many cameras do it for you: focus bracketing or focus shift (Nikon, Canon, Fujifilm, OM System, Panasonic, Sony). Close up at f/5.6–f/8, use small steps and 10–50 frames; for a landscape, 3–6 frames are usually enough.
- Keep the light steady: a cloud passing between frames shows as patches.
Clean — a burst to average
- 8–16 frames: four halve the noise, sixteen quarter it. Burst mode or a short interval both work.
- Handheld is fine: keep “Line the frames up” on.
- For a long-exposure look — silky water, streaked clouds — use a tripod, turn lining up off and shoot frames over several seconds or minutes.
Vanish — a place without the crowd
- A tripod or a steady rest: the frames must line up on their own.
- 8–20 frames, a few seconds apart (an interval timer helps), so that every spot is clear in most of them.
- Only what moves goes: someone standing still for the whole series stays. Busier places need more frames and longer gaps.
Trails — stars, traffic and fireworks
- A tripod, focus set by hand (at infinity for stars) and an interval timer with no gap between frames.
- Stars: wide angle, wide aperture, 15–30 s exposures at ISO 800–3200, for as long as you can — an hour makes clear arcs. Turn the camera’s long-exposure noise reduction off: it doubles each frame and leaves gaps in the trails.
- Traffic and fireworks: 1–10 s exposures, as many as the scene gives.
- “Darkest” keeps the shadows instead: lights vanish from a scene.
Blend — an exposure bracket
- 3–7 frames a stop or two apart, for example −2, 0, +2 EV: the camera’s auto exposure bracketing (AEB) does it in one press.
- Change the shutter speed, not the aperture, so the depth of field stays the same.
- A tripod is best; handheld, a fast burst works, with “Line the frames up” on.
Pick — the sharpest of a burst
- Shoot a burst whenever a shot might be soft: a long lens, a slow shutter, a moving subject. Sharp scores every frame and hands back the sharpest, untouched.
Pano — a panorama
- Turn on the spot — ideally around the lens, not your body — and take a frame every few steps, left to right or right to left, in one row.
- Each frame should overlap the last by a third or more. Holding the camera upright gives a taller picture.
- Lock exposure, white balance and focus, so the sky doesn’t change from frame to frame. Sharp evens out what is left.
- Things that move across a seam — people, cars, waves — can be cut in two: wait for them to pass.
RAW files
RAW files from almost every camera open in every browser and are developed alike, so a bracket keeps its stops. Two kinds can’t be developed: Nikon’s “High Efficiency” NEFs and DNGs compressed with JPEG XL. For those, Sharp uses the full-size JPEG the camera puts inside the file (Nikon’s do), and says so. A run can’t mix RAW files with JPEGs.